Amnesty slams 'outrageous' Fiji newspaper sedition case

The Fiji Times is known as an occasionally feisty critic of the regime

Sedition charges brought against executives at Fiji's oldest newspaper are "absolutely outrageous", Amnesty International said Thursday, while accusing the government of trying to intimidate the media.

Three staff members at the Fiji Times -- occasionally a feisty critic of the regime -- are facing up to seven years in jail for publishing a letter to the editor last year containing inflammatory comments about Muslims.

"To charge people with sedition over something that's printed by an outside contributor in a newspaper is extremely heavy handed," Amnesty's New Zealand chief Grant Bayldon told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"Fiji has a really sad history of suppressing freedom of expression and we really have to wonder if the motivation here is to intimidate one of the few media outlets that is still independent in Fiji."

The letter in question was printed in a low-circulation Fijian-language supplement of the Times, which remains the Pacific nation's oldest newspaper established in 1869.